Some companies seem to always be just outside my grasp. They sit on my watch-list for long periods and often never present an opportunity to acquire the stock. Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE), which closed at $42.93 on December 28, 2007, fits the bill. I almost included it in my Chasing Value: Final list -- 8 stocks for 2008, but alas, I decided I felt more confident in stocks like Loews Corp. (NYSE: LTR), which was the last stock added.

I asked one of the advertising company officers in town how important Adobe software was to their business and he replied, "They could not function without it, they would be out of business." I'm sure he was exaggerating, but only a little.

Adobe is not a monopoly because you can work around it with less robust programs, but no company offers the integrated suite of graphics products that Adobe does, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat and if you're online much, you must receive multiple PDF files per day.

It occurred to me recently that we probably have entered a new age of ubiquitous piracy. A world that sneaked up on us quite unobtrusively, little by little permeating everything, and until recently, we did not realize we had been hijacked. There must be exponentially more pirates operating today, both in overall quantity and as a percentage of the world population, than there has ever been at any time in history.

Last week Alan Abelson wrote in his Up and Down Wall Street column (Barron's, subscription required) that 80% of the software sold in China was pirated. No kidding - and he quipped that software companies should be happy because that meant they were paying for the other 20%. Oh boy! - this is sure to please Adobe Systems (NASDAQ: ADBE), Intuit Inc (NASDAQ: INTU), and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT). The billions of dollars lost to piracy in one year is certainly more than all the doubloons ever high-jacked on the highs seas.

Software is not the only thing being pirated, everything is being pirated. One could make the argument that in China, and even worldwide pirated goods would easily make up the largest business ever known if it was a single enterprise.